The core protocol uses HTTP/2 as a transport, yes, but you'd have to convert the conceptual gRPC request to the protobuf-encoded version and somehow pass that to the HTTP/2 endpoint as a binary blob, then decode/match the binary blob you get back - which none of the status pingers really offer either.
(You could use `gRPC-web` to make JSON-encoded requests but you need specific support on the server end for that.)